


orphan your god

by crownedcarl



Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Ambiguous Relationships, Character Study, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 02:23:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7080937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownedcarl/pseuds/crownedcarl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A boy pulls her out of the river and breathes life into her. This, she will later come to realize, is not a metaphor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	orphan your god

**Author's Note:**

> this fic contains explicit mentions of abortion, misogyny, body autonomy issues, incest, rape & pedophilia. no explicit physical acts occur, which is why i've chosen not to tag for it, but it merits a mention and is also why this is rated mature
> 
> let the record state that i probably messed up the myth of lilith but oh well
> 
> this is my insomniac take/character exploration of a female lex luthor. yeah

Lex Luthor has always been an oddity.

After the meteors and after the hair loss, she refused to wear wigs. Her father had looked at her with a withering disappointment; as much as he claimed to care about her health and well-being, he cared more about her status and her status, she thinks, is directly tied to her appearance as a woman.

People don’t see her as a woman. She is a genderless, alien being with no heart.

There are days where she looks at herself in beautiful dresses and makes herself laugh. Her fingers run across her hairless scalp and down to her fair eyebrows, cocking her head at an angle that makes her look predatory. She doesn’t see a woman in the mirror; she sees a god.

-

A boy pulls her out of the river and breathes life into her. This, she will later come to realize, is not a metaphor.

His name is Clark Kent and he’s the farthest thing from ordinary, no matter what he says. He accepts Lex’s friendship with only a minimal amount of suspicion, despite his father’s coldness towards Lex. She doesn’t expect it to be any different.

Clark Kent is sixteen years old and Lex wonders how a boy like him could ever see a person beneath her strangeness, but he does. He does.

-

Lionel Luthor is a bad man. Lex Luthor is arguably no better, but at the age of sixteen she finds herself hating her father with a passion, staring down at the cold tiled floor as he converses with their private and very, very discreet physician. “Tomorrow,” Lionel orders, his voice ringing out sharply in the big, sparsely decorated room. “I want it done tomorrow.”

She’s an embarrassment and the black sheep in a family of two. An abortion is the only way to get rid of yet another media scandal; Lex doesn’t want a baby, anyway, but whenever her father says left, she has a tendency to go right. It’s in her blood, that contradictory nature of hers. “I will never forgive you,” she announces calmly. This is her body, peculiar and strange as it is. This is her life. “I hope you can live with that.”

“I’ve lived with worse,” Lionel assures her. The next day, the procedure goes smoothly and is over quickly. Lex, despite her protests, feels some measure of relief.

-

Half the town thinks she’s sleeping with Clark and the other half thinks she’s paying him to. She doesn’t care what they think, but it does merit some thought; is the Lex Luthor they know truly so reprehensible that it is, in their collective consciousness, feasible for her to take advantage of a teenage boy?

She supposes it is. Their fear is, after all, a reflection of their own natures. Lex has never put a hand on Clark. She cannot, however, deny that the thought hasn’t crossed her mind.

Lex is used to being genderless. She is accustomed to the way men look at her or rather, all the little ways that they don’t. She is lean and tall and hairless, her chest hardly noticeable. There is nothing feminine or sexual about her even as she stands naked; she is too strange to be found appealing but to a select few and she has long since burned those bridges.

Clark treats her like a person. Lex had forgotten what that felt like, she thinks.

-

She is the pariah of the town, bearing her father’s name like a scarlet letter. She is no woman.

She is no Eve. The mantle of Lilith fits her better; the defiant woman in the Garden of Eden, unchaining herself from the path God set her on to seek greener pastures. She is the embodiment of this town’s fear and she lets them shun her with grace.

Her destiny lies somewhere outside of the small-minded confines of Smallville. She can’t quite figure out where Clark factors into her destiny, but she’s a resourceful woman – she can make room.

-

“Have you heard the tale of Lilith?”

Clark raises his head to look at her, his mouth parted on an as of yet unvoiced question. Lex continues before Clark can question the relevance of her words; she finds herself staring out of the window forlornly, a half-smile playing at her lips. “There’s no small amount of dispute about her role throughout history, least of all the credibility of the accounts, but they say she was Adam’s first wife.”

Her eyes land on Clark. He’s looking at her intently. He’s always been good at understanding her. “Now, we all know about Eve, created from Adam’s rib. Before her, God made Lilith and Adam out of the same material.”

A traitorous whisper in her head tells her that Clark has never expected her to be Eve, but he could never want her as Lilith. She is the mother of all demons. “She wasn’t content to play out the role she was assigned as Adam’s wife. Lilith refused to be second to her husband and she rebelled – she spoke God’s name and as a result, she gained the power to leave the Garden of Eden. Can you imagine,” Lex sighs, “The strength, the willpower? To defy your maker and find your own way, regardless of any issues of morality?”

“She sounds like someone I know.”

Lex smiles, faintly. “Don’t flatter me, Clark.”

He always understands what she means to say.

-

Lex doesn’t fuck Clark.

Clark doesn’t fuck her, either.

There are nights where she lies beneath silk sheets and fantasizes; a woman of her standing could have anything she ever wanted with the right whisper in the right person’s ear, but this is something she wants to take for herself. Taking is what she does.

Her fingers are long and pale and deceptively smooth. There are scars on her palms from fencing practice, from childhood accidents, pink and silver and entirely unnoticeable. Lex knows her body down to the last blemish; she’s made it her priority not to ever let anyone know her better than she knows herself.

Clark Kent is beautiful and golden and something unique. Lex Luthor is strange and pale and something unique, but in the wrong way.

Together, she thinks, they could make history. Her fingers slip between her thighs. She muffles Clark’s name against her open palm.

-

Smallville is a town ripe with rumors.

She isn’t fucking Clark and she isn’t fucking her father, either, but the rumors are constant, unchanging and unoriginal in equal measure. Lionel would never sink so low as to touch his deformity of a daughter in any way that could be interpreted as anything other than perfunctory and familial, but Lex muses. There are these thoughts within her, these compulsions. She’s afraid they might rule her, one day.

Lionel had reacted with a blank stare the first time he caught her sneaking back home with a much too short dress with a neckline that was much too low, but she hadn’t known what to think of his eyes as they traveled down the length of her body. He had her examined, the day after. He was there to watch.

“You want to fuck me, daddy?” she had asked, an unpleasant smile curving her mouth. Fourteen and long since rid of her innocence, Lex had waited for her father to explode. “You want to fuck me like everyone else does?”

A woman’s life is a hard life, but Lex hadn’t yet been a woman. Fourteen years old and she had stared her father right in the eyes, calculating a bitter victory.

She thinks some people would call it incest, would call it rape, but Lex knows that it would only be another game between them. She’s glad it didn’t happen, then. She hadn’t been taught how to win, yet.

Lionel had said her full name with all the world-weariness of a man who thought he had seen it all and proceeded to order her to her room. He did not, in the end, follow.

-

Clark could never understand, but Lex is glad for it. She’s glad that he’s far removed from the life she leads; she is happy to have him at the fringes of her world, golden and warm, but friendship is something she hasn’t had much practice at.

It doesn’t help that friendship isn’t what she wants from Clark at all, but even Lex can’t have everything.

-

“You,” Lionel emphasizes, “Are my daughter and my heir. I couldn’t let you run around, destroying our family’s reputation.”

“Oh, don’t you worry,” Lex responds, her dress clingy in the summer heat. “You’ve managed to taint our reputation just fine without my help.”

He has taken yet another thing from her, but it’s inconsequential. Lex has been biding her time for years, now. The right moment will come, but until then, she can’t let herself go too far and justify Lionel disowning her. As things stand, she still enjoys to get under his skin.

“Alexandra,” he snaps, as if she’s the one tearing things apart and pretending they could be put back together. “You are a grown woman. Start behaving like it.”

“Thought you liked me all innocent and childish, daddy,” Lex drawls, spreading her thighs open. The dress falls lower. She can’t tell if Lionel is looking at her. “How are my childhood theater skills paying off?”

Her father is all but mute until the moment where he shakes his head in disapproval; he turns to look at her.

“You disgust me,” Lionel says. “I expect better from you.”

-

Lex isn’t fucking her father but when Clark begins to look at her sideways, she realizes the extent to which the perverse little rumors have been spread.

Jonathan Kent never thought much of her, anyway. She can’t fall much lower in his eyes, but his wife’s pity is far from preferable to his own particular brand of scorn and disgust.

Clark doesn’t ask but sometimes, Lex can tell that he wants to. She wonders what she could possibly say, however, when nobody has ever thought she was anything more than her father’s daughter.

Clark doesn’t ask and Lex wants to see him wild, suddenly, watching him do his homework in her home office. He doesn’t say much. Lex goes over the LuthorCorp finances, one hand on her bare thigh.

It isn’t warm enough to wear this skirt. Clark should have noticed the significance of Lex foregoing her usual slacks; he should have noticed the touch of lipstick to her mouth.

Femininity doesn’t fit her. It feels too much like playing pretend, or a cage.

_I want you to fuck me._

It would be an easy thing to say but not an easy thing to take back and Lex cannot cope with another brutal loss. Clark is too important. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, shifting in her seat, gut clenching with heat. She isn’t wearing anything beneath the skirt. Clark should have noticed that, too. “I might be in need of a vacation.”

Clark’s summer break is coming up. “Yeah?” he asks, peering curiously at her, his smile soft and oddly shy, as if he’d like to request what she’s about to offer. “Where to?”

“A few weeks in Metropolis, maybe,” she confesses, because no matter how little she wants to think of that city as her home, the shackles are there. Home has never been a kind place. “Or somewhere warm, somewhere with white beaches.”

“It sounds nice,” Clark offers. When Lex asks if he’d like to come along, his smile is a brilliant thing.

-

Lex is taking advantage.

Clark has a big heart and Lex is taking advantage. She has always known that he doesn’t regard her as an equal, but quite the opposite; a mentor of sorts, but the boundaries have been blurred since the very start. She has tried to be Clark’s friend, but she feels more as if she’s playing some other, vital role in the grand scheme of things. She can’t be Clark’s friend.

He tastes vaguely of sugar when he kisses her, once, but it’s just the once. Clark is lonely and hurting and Lex is taking advantage.

She is surprised by her own restraint when she pushes Clark away and declares that he’s too drunk to know what he’s doing, but she neglects to mention that he is also too young to know what he wants.

He doesn’t want Lex. Nobody wants Lex Luthor like that.

Lex knows that if she began to call herself Alexandra and wore the damned wigs stuffed in her closet, then maybe the world would be sympathetic. She knows that if she conceded to using makeup and perhaps investing in a push-up bra, that shift in her public image would change the way people saw her, but she would rather keep them guessing.

Clark sees her as a friend sees her as a mentor sees her as Lex. That matters more than she thought it would.

-

What would be worse: being the woman to seduce a young, innocent boy into her arms, or being the woman involved carnally with her father?

Smallville can’t decide. Lex is either a pedophile or a pervert or both at once, for the particularly inventive, but she’s neither. Her father has never seen her as worthy of his affection or attention; he has no reason to consider her anything other than a failure.

Clark doesn’t think she’s a bad person or a bad friend but therein lays the problem. Clark thinks of her as a friend.

-

Lex could almost convince herself of this being a romantic getaway, of sorts, with her and Clark in a villa on the beach, but they don’t share a bed. They don’t even share a room, or a floor.

Perhaps it’s for the best. Lex has never been excellent at controlling her impulses.

Her white nightgown is nearly translucent as she sits on the balcony as darkness begins to set. It is too short; Clark won’t notice, she reminds herself, one leg drawn up against her chest, her eyes on the night sky.

Clark joins her some minutes later. He smells clean. “I want you to know,” he tells her, “That this is the best vacation I’ve ever been on – the only one actually, but I don’t think it gets much better.”

Lex is selfish and deranged; she knows as much. She wants to kiss Clark bloody. She wants to eat his heart. “I’m glad,” she tells him, “That you enjoyed it. We should do this more often.”

_fuck me fuck me fuck me_

Desperate, wild thoughts. They consume her, bit by bit. 

-

Years after the fact, Lex continues to love Clark Kent.

All hatred stems from a great love – she heard that, somewhere, dismissing it instantly. It was certainly never true in the case of Lex and Lionel where the mutual hatred seemed as if it grew more toxic every day, but hating Clark Kent is a complicated thing.

Lex wants him dead, yes. Lex wants to fuck him, yes. Lex wants to go back to the days filled with Smallville sunshine and do it all over again, yes.

All of these truths build up inside of her. She can’t tell her rage and her love apart, anymore. She ponders if she ever could.

-

Superman visits her late at night.

He neither intends to destroy her or pacify her; Superman, she has heard, has morals.

Clark Kent is beautiful, even now, standing in her bedroom, watching Lex as she rises from the bed to approach. Will he even remember, she muses, that this is the very same nightgown that she wore on that humid summer night?

 _I want you to fuck me_ , she thinks. That much is still true. “You can’t stop me,” she informs him, standing her ground. This hatred will consume her. Clark always said as much. “Unless you kill me, which we both know you won’t do. Brave, noble Clark Kent…or do you prefer Superman, nowadays?”

Clark stares at her. Lex stares back.

There are snapshots of memory rooted inside of her deepest, blackest dreams; a flash of Clark’s perfect teeth as he smiled, or the wind tousling his hair as they took one of Lex’s cars for a long drive. She dreams of his hands, his throat, his wide sweet eyes. She dreams more than she would like to.

“Lex,” Clark says; she is still Lex to him, despite her crimes. She will always be Lex to him. “Tell me why.”

“Because I hate you,” she responds. “What more do you need to know?”

She had told him a story, once, about a woman turned demon turned evil. That woman escaped her destiny; defied the gods. Lex had allowed Clark to draw a comparison, there, but who could have known that she would end up here?

No, she did know. She always had a great capacity for destruction. “Hate,” Clark tells her, “Isn’t that easy.”

“No,” Lex concedes, crossing the space between them. “No, it’s not.”

Clark Kent isn’t sixteen anymore and Lex still wants to fuck him, possess him, demean him. She wants to worship and blaspheme in the same breath, but while her feelings haven’t changed, neither have his.

She will always be Lex to him; never Alexandra, never red-mouthed beauty with curls to die for. She will always be the same Lex Luthor and Clark, well, he’ll always be that kid from Smallville that saved her life and paid the ultimate price for it.

“Do you even know,” Clark asks her, “Why we’re still fighting?”

“Please,” Lex says, but there’s venom in her voice, sitting on her tongue. “What else are we meant to do?”

She would have given Clark the world, once. Lex wants to destroy it for him, now.

“You can’t pretend,” Clark goes on, but he isn’t the same boy and it doesn’t help at all that Lex is, in fact, the same person she has always been. “You can’t pretend that we weren’t _friends_ , that I didn’t mean something to you-“

Lex looks away from him. Can’t stare for too long; she’s risking everything, even allowing Clark to visit her in the dead of night. There is nothing left to talk about.

“You saved my life, once.”

That, however, merits a reminder. Clark looks taken aback, but Lex simply finishes speaking by saying “I suppose you should have known you’d come to regret it.”

“I don’t,” Clark says, but he leaves.

Lex has never been an easy woman to love. There is a world out there ripe for her taking; once, she imagined Clark by her side as she rose up to claim her kingdom, but the victory will be just as sweet with him on the other side of the battlefield.

Clark Kent does, in the end, deserve better than her.

-

_"after love, no one is what they were before.”_


End file.
